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Reviews
Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017)
Worth watching, but horribly biased
Jane Campion: One of our finest filmmakers, but she wears her disdain for men on her sleeve. I thought the casting of TOTL China Girl was impeccable. Nicole Kidman was captivating and perfect, as usual. Gwendolyn Christie was surprisingly surprising in her role as a timid, chain smoking pregnant rookie taken under the wing of Elizabeth Moss's Robin Griffin. But don't get me wrong, the first season was very good as well. My only beef with this show is the extremely one-sided viewpoints of men and women. Campion's obvious disdain for men is taken to the point of absurdity and downright annoyance: Every man Moss's Griffin character comes in contact with asks her to go to bed with him. It's like, "Hi, I'm Detective Griffin! Hi, I'm Detective Parker. What do you say you and I get a room. No strings attached?" It is like this with literally every single male character Griffin encounters, in both the first and second seasons. There is not even any courting, just, "Hi, I'm So and So. I really admire you and would like to get in your pants." And of course, all the women are emotional basket cases in need of psychological re-education - all because they were screwed up by those evil, nasty, sweaty, gluttonous, grunting, filthy, testosterone-poisoned men. And the women who aren't mentally screwed up by men are lesbians. Go figure. As talented as Jane Campion is, her blatant man hating and portrayals of all women, or at least a great many of them, as victims left mentally scarred forever by men is cliche and boring. I hope she takes a different approach to her characterizations of both sexes in future works, but it is unlikely, as she built her career on her feminist ideologies, as biased as they are. But as a director, I cannot discredit her talents and contributions to the art of film. TOTL is worth the watch.
Succession (2018)
Derivative and dull
In the phenomenal Showtime series "Billions," the intriguing character Taylor Mason repeatedly says that, more than money and power, she always needs "forward momentum." The inferior (and that is being nice) HBO series "Succession" should have heeded that philosophy. When I saw the trailer, I got excited, thinking HBO was going to give us its version of Showtime's hit series. Instead, it gave us a derivative and dull series chock-full of cliches and stereotypes that completely turned me off after 15 minutes of the second episode. The first episode, albeit slow-moving and unexciting, managed to at least hold my interest enough to see what, if anything, would happen next. I thought, 'Maybe this just needs time to build up." But it didn't happen. It was grueling to listen to the boring, pointless and profanity-laced dialogue (could the writing get any worse) that consisted mainly of rival sibling banter over, well, nothing remotely interesting. The great dramatist David Mamet said goog writing is all about "getting there." If there is something to say, say it. Keep the story moving forward at all times. Sell the drama. If you don't have the viewer completely engrossed and immersed in the story in the first 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to lose them, and likely never get them back. I gave this show the benefit of the doubt and gave it 75 minutes, but will never return to it. It's a major fail in every possible way.